Dan Maes thinks he saved the Republican Party in Colorado from minor party status and future obscurity and that he is a hero. He probably also thinks that his heroism was aided by divine intervention.
Colorado Tea Party people who supported Dan Maes think they saved the Republican Party too. They bought the myth fed to them during last Spring’s precinct caucuses that they represented the people of Colorado, and all the higher ideals of our constitutional representative system of government were invested in them. Trouble is, the people of Colorado never give their consent to be represented by the caucus system or those individuals who just show up one night in April to take charge of the caucus system. So, armed with a myth, Maes-supporting Tea Partyers soldiered on and now feel like heroes too.
Republican Party leaders appeared to sit the whole thing out. They watched from the sidelines while Maes and Buck worked the idealistic Tea Party types to their own advantage. All they could muster was a hope that the Tea Party wouldn’t fragment the Republican party. So, obsessed with their own political survival, they neglected to defend Jane Norton, or Josh Penry, and they left Tom Tancredo adrift–the only ones who really did embody Tea Party ideals.
They kept the Tea Party under the Republican umbrella all right, but threw out any candidate who actually walked the Tea Party walk. That left them with remainders who could be manipulated–the 11% who bought them a narrow dodge of minor party status in Colorado in an historic Republican wave that washed over the entire country. How they managed to avoid queering the Colorado statehouse turnover is kind of a mystery.
On the issues we had key government-limiting tax and debt measures to win, the death cult of abortion to defeat, immunity from Obamacare to enact, and the Republicans stood by and watched it all go down.
They really earned minor party status in my book. There are no heroes in this election in Colorado.